VAN JONES

CNN host Van Jones is a social justice innovator who has launched several successful change-making enterprises, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and ColorOfChange.org. A former special adviser to the Obama White House, he rose to national prominence promoting eco-friendly, “green jobs” for low-income communities. Today, his Dream Corps organization leads four major initiatives: #YesWeCode, working to help 100,000 young women and men from underrepresented backgrounds find success in the tech sector; #cut50, working to make communities safer while reducing the number of people in prisons and jails; #LoveArmy, creating alternatives to hate-based political movements; and Green For All, to advance environmental solutions for families and workers living close to sources of pollution.

He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Green Collar Economy, Rebuild the Dream, and Beyond The Messy Truth. A Yale-educated attorney, Van’s guiding slogan is: close prison doors and open doors of opportunity.

I met Van in 1998, when I was a judge for the Reebok Human Rights Award and Van was the recipient. His acceptance at the ceremony was one of the best speeches I had ever heard. I went to visit the program he ran at the Ella Baker Center in San Francisco, and was deeply impressed by his cutting-edge efforts combating police brutality. That led to his work on juvenile justice reform and creating green jobs for formerly incarcerated youth. Van served on the board of directors of RFK Human Rights.

Van Jones: You know, I have a great relationship with Newt Gingrich—we work together on opioids and criminal justice—and I fight Koch Industries on all their environmental policies, which are terrible, but I work with them on their criminal justice policies, which are pretty enlightened. It’s become increasingly difficult to be a strong progressive who has strategic partnerships and friendships that cross the aisle. It’s a real struggle.

Your dad would understand that, and he’d have ideas about what to do. The thing is, he’s been the North Star for me politically, even more so than Dr. King. Dr. King is a hard person to pattern yourself after. You can be inspired by Dr. King’s words, but you can’t model your speaking style on his, because nobody can talk that way.

When I was in law school, I’d fly in from New Haven to Memphis, and my dad would pick me up at the airport and drive us for an hour and a half, all the way home to Jackson, Tennessee. On one of those car rides, I said to him, “The year I was born, 1968: It must have been an awful year. Here you are, you’re in your early twenties, your wife’s pregnant with twins, and in your own hometown, Memphis, Dr. King is killed, and you’re in Memphis when it happens. It must have been shattering.”

My dad said, “Well, yes and no.”

You can imagine my shock. He was an African American southerner, strong on civil rights, and he said, “Yes and no.” We go on about for another mile or two, and I say, “Well, Daddy, why’d you say, ‘Yes and no’?”

He says, “We were very hurt and very angry when Dr. King was killed, but we still had Bobby Kennedy. So there was hurt, but there was still hope. Once they killed Bobby Kennedy, everybody gave up.”

Now, that’s probably the first and last time I heard my father say anything positive about any white person. He was born in 1944. He grew up in wretched poverty under the most aggressive segregation. He joined the military—when everybody was running out of the military, my dad ran in, trying to escape from poverty. He gets out of poverty, puts himself through college, puts his little brother through college, puts his cousin through college, marries the college president’s daughter—my mother—and they put me and my sister through college. In the mid-’80s, the NAACP had to sue our county to let my dad become a principal—our middle school principal. So my dad felt that white people were tough on him, and in the privacy of our home, he was tough on white people. But his respect for Bobby Kennedy was absolute.

Kerry Kennedy: Why do you think that was? Did he ever say?

VJ: Well, I could almost recite what he said on that car ride because it was such a shocking thing to hear. I mean, I had always loved Bobby Kennedy! I had a little corkboard in my bedroom when I was a child, and on the left side of it I wrote “K.S.”—Kennedy section. And I’d get my little Weekly Reader, and with my little round-blade scissors—you know, so little kids can’t stab each other—I’d cut out anything about the Kennedys and tack it on the board with thumbtacks. By the time I got to third or fourth grade, I had so many articles about the Kennedys.

I even gave my Star Wars action figures different personas: Luke Skywalker was JFK, Han Solo was RFK, and Lando Calrissian was MLK.

I wasn’t the biggest kid. I weighed 89 pounds in ninth grade, and probably half my body weight was my glasses, I was a bully magnet. I escaped the bullies by riding my bike into the woods and reading comic books about my favorite heroes: the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and the X-Men. I dreamed of someday becoming a champion of the downtrodden. So I liked Bobby Kennedy. I just didn’t really know where my father was coming from. So I said, “Well, Daddy, why do you feel that way?”

He took a minute before he answered. He said, “You know, Jack Kennedy can give a speech. Man, he can take you to the moon and back. You can just hear his intelligence and his education, and people love to hear him talk. But when Bobby Kennedy talked, you felt he was talking just to you—personally. There was nobody else in the world. He wanted you to understand something.”

My dad said, “We don’t have any confidence in that poor white man because we’ve been working next to him for long enough to know he’s never going to give us a break. But we thought, maybe that rich white man, who has enough self-confidence to hear our cause… When he left, everybody just gave up.”

Well, that stayed with me. I’m twenty-two, first year of law school, trying to figure out what to do and how to do it, and that conversation made me go back to Bobby Kennedy. At that time, you had to work very hard to get a Bobby Kennedy speech. You didn’t have the internet. But at Yale I was able to find some of his interviews and speeches, and it freed me. The Bobby Kennedy I found was a revelation—I saw how you could be a man in public life with a sharp mind and a big heart. In full public view, his heart’s broken. And he’s not even trying to hide it. I mean, you can hear it in his voice—the grief for his brother, the concern for poor kids. I never saw any tears, but you could tell they were being shed. He was completely real, nothing theatrical about him. You could feel him working his way through his relationship to his words and to the crowd and to the country. So I just found, sharing a basic shyness with him, that an overriding sense of public purpose is what gets you past that sadness.

What I took from your dad was the intimacy of his style of speaking. And a lot of my speaking style is directly derivative of the permission I felt from Bobby Kennedy to be emotionally authentic and never to lower the intellectual bar. He showed me that smart-with-heart path. That’s why he’s been my North Star.

KK: I recently watched one of my father’s last interviews. It was in May 1968, with David Frost, and my father’s just struggling the whole time. Nothing is smooth or rehearsed, nothing that comes out of his mouth had been written down beforehand. It is absolutely authentic. He was taking the questions seriously and answering from his heart, and he expected people who heard to understand how seriously he was facing issues that weren’t simple. You just never see anything like that in professional politics these days.

VJ: I recently gave a speech at the South by Southwest Festival, and I said, “It used to be completely acceptable for a Democrat to go to Harlem, sit with the farmworkers, or talk to Native Americans, and then go right to Appalachia and sit with those families, too. But where’s Bobby Kennedy? Where did that go?”

Now you have the underdogs pitted against each other, which is always the way, but we’ve almost accepted that it’s supposed to be that way. You have this opioid crisis, this big crisis of addiction that’s hitting mostly white folks in small-town America. I would imagine it would almost never occur to a white pastor in West Virginia dealing with an addiction crisis in his congregation that, hey, there are African American ministers in South Central Los Angeles who’ve been dealing with an addiction crisis for a couple of decades now. Let me call my Christian brother in faith and get some counsel. That would never arise in the moral imagination of struggling white folks in the Rust Belt or in Appalachia. At the same time, you have that African American pastor in South Central, and I imagine it never occurs to her to say, oh, my goodness, there’s an addiction crisis that’s broken out in West Virginia. Let me call my brothers and sisters in faith over there and see if we might be of service. Might there be a sermon I can share? Might there be a program that I started that I can help you replicate? That’s how thoroughly divided we are.

The politicians today don’t try to break out of it. They capitalize on it. They extend it. That wasn’t Bobby Kennedy. He had a vision of America where everybody had a place of honor and dignity and every individual was expected to be a decent person and do a good job. Now that’s almost gone. It’s all about blaming the other guy. If you try to point out that maybe your side isn’t 100 percent perfect, get ready to be a piñata.

KK: Have you had that experience?

VJ: I had it a few weeks ago.

KK: Can you tell me about it?

VJ: Well, I pointed out the obvious fact that Donald Trump is an atrocious person, and an atrocious president, but [in his February 2017 address to a joint session of Congress], he gave a presidential speech and he did what presidents do: He didn’t go off talking about his polling numbers. He didn’t attack the media. He put Americans up in the balcony—for his own political purposes, like every president—and he used their stories well. And in that moment, he, for the first time, looked like a president. I didn’t say, “He looked like a good president.” But with that speech, wow, I was moved emotionally by some of the stories he was sharing, especially of the widow of the Navy SEAL.

KK: Carryn Owens, the woman whose husband, Ryan, was killed in the [January 2017] bombing raid in Yemen.

VJ: You would have thought I had joined the Trump administration. Two weeks later, liberals were still kicking my butt because I’d said something kind about somebody on the other side. I got scolded for “normalizing” Trump. I just think that if somebody does ninety-nine things bad and one thing good, you should say, “The guy did ninety-nine things bad and one thing good.” That’s required if you’re going to be a decent person, if you’re going to be a fair person. But that’s now perilous because we have to stay polarized, because it’s now hip to be polarized.

If you’re the kind of leader Bobby Kennedy was, your idea of the country is that everybody counts, everybody matters, and everybody has a place of dignity and honor—even your opponents. You don’t see that viewpoint today. The liberal stand has become “If you don’t listen to NPR, if you don’t use all the right lingo, if you’re just not like us, you suck. You are heathens. We are the civilizing force, and we’re bewildered that everyone won’t accept our faith.” It’s obnoxious, and it creates openings for our opponents to say, “All these PC people look down on us.” We’ve got to say: “Listen, you’re a coal miner. Maybe I oppose your view on race, your view on gender, your view on a lot of things, but just as you are, you deserve—”

KK: Health care.

VJ: “Health care. Just as you are, you deserve your pension not to be stolen by the coal company. Just as you are, vote against me for the rest of your life—I want you to have a long life, though. I don’t want you to die of black lung and stop voting against me because you died. I want to keep you alive voting against me because just as you are, you’re worthy. You bring things to this country that we need: your faith, your commitment to family, your work ethic. These are things that we all value greatly, and I want you to be even more awesome and include in your circle of love and concern black people and Muslims and other people who are also worthy.” That’s not the same as: “You’re a bigot and you’re uneducated and you’re a toothless, mouth-breathing embarrassment. Now vote for me because my policies are good for you.” Nobody is going to do that.

KK: It’s about respect.

VJ: What was so clear about Bobby Kennedy was that he had deep respect for our traditions, for both the intellectual foundations and the moral purpose of the country. That’s not to say he was not a tough politician. He was tough as nails, pragmatic, and ruthless. But that’s politics.

For me, the standard is to be able to go into the middle of complete chaos, urban uprisings, with moral clarity for both sides. That’s Bobby Kennedy. Now, who would you trust to do that today? I don’t see anybody.

For whatever reason, during the 2016 campaign I wound up getting a lot of attention as a commentator, and a big chunk of the CNN audience took to me. So CNN gave me a show we called The Messy Truth.

I talked to a lot of Trump supporters in their homes, knee-to-knee at the kitchen table, or at the local diner. And I’m discovering that they don’t feel inside the way they appear to us. To us, they seem like this rising force of menace and malice and resentment, and they just don’t feel that way at all. They feel besieged and misunderstood and under attack from various centers of power, and I’ve been trying to challenge progressives to take their pain seriously—and not just their economic pain, frankly. Their cultural anxieties are to be taken seriously as well. Change is hard. We’re shoving a lot of change down the throats of a lot of people in the Western democracies—demographic change, cultural change, change around sexuality and gender, new genders being introduced—and change is hard. Some people are gagging on it. We shouldn’t slow down. All of these changes are overdue, some of them by thousands of years when it comes to gender. But you have to have some empathy for people when they’re going through stages of grief and shock and fear and resentment. Just at the level of understanding the thing. We have to listen to them and try to understand how they experience what’s happening to them.

KK: Do you think that leads to better policy change, to better public policy?

VJ: Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care. We spend too much time trying to figure that out and too little time trying to figure each other out. Let’s try to understand each other first. In a dictatorship, you have to agree. In a democracy, we don’t have to agree. So let’s say we’re going to disagree on policy for a while. And I have no idea what the right policy outcomes are or how to get there politically. I don’t know what to do. But I know who to be. We have to be better, we have to try to understand, and that’s what we have given up on. We’re talking about each other but not talking to each other.

People say to me: Van, you’re giving these guys passes for being racist. No, I’m not. I’ve been fighting against racism my whole life. I will fight against it in the morning and the evening. I also think there’s value in talking to people to try to understand where they’re coming from—rather than trying to conquer them or convert people. Yet even just doing that challenges my base. The liberal base doesn’t want that. They want you to wear the boxing gloves morning, noon, and night, and to be actively policing every single person around you for any wayward syllable or semicolon or pronoun. And if you aren’t doing that, you’re facilitating the rise of another Hitler because you’re normalizing all this horrific stuff.

I remember when liberalism allowed for nuance, contradiction, surprise, confession. Now we’re becoming Trump. Leaders have a tremendous impact on cultures, and his race to the bottom is pulling us to the bottom. Trump has no sympathy for anybody but himself. Well, now we have no sympathy for anybody but ourselves. He won’t listen to anything past two syllables; well, we won’t either. He reduces his entire brain down to 140 characters; well, you’re going to have to write 140 characters, and if you leave one character off, I’m going to kick your ass. This is all horrible, so I’m challenging it.

I was in Chicago—Black History Month, big black church on the Southside, everybody comes to hear Van Jones, “Mr. Whitelash,” he’s going to come and stick it to Donald Trump and stick up for Black Lives Matter. But I didn’t say one thing about any black cause. I talked about coal miners in West Virginia losing their pensions, and I got two standing ovations—because we’ve drawn our circle too small, and people know it. Our job is not to love humans to make them better. Our job is to love humans to make sure we don’t become worse people over the course of a difficult decade, which we’re now in. And it doesn’t matter if they vote for us or like us back. That’s not the point. The issue is: Can we use the situation that we’re in to become better and not bitter? That’s the moral challenge for the Left.

We had an election in which our worst nightmares came true. Now we don’t have the normal means and mechanisms of power to protect ourselves. The Supreme Court, Congress, the state legislatures, and the White House are all controlled by our opponents. So the only question becomes not “what you do?”—because anything you do is going to be futile for at least two years, until the next election—but: Who are you going to be? Are you going to be trying to beat polarization with polarization? Just oppose everything? But you found it morally objectionable when the Tea Party did that. So now you’re going to become what you opposed? Well, it’s a valid choice, but we have to understand it’s not the only choice. The other choices are more difficult.

KK: Speaking of moments of struggle: You were working for President Obama as an adviser on green jobs, and you were ousted because of a smear campaign against you based on what we now call fake news. The claim was that you had signed a petition saying 9/11 might have been an inside job, when in fact you had never signed anything like that. When we were kids, my father used to have us memorize poems and recite them on Sunday nights, and one of his favorites was “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. I’ll never forget: “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…” That’s what happened to you. It must have been a terrible experience.

VJ: It was devastating. I think I was clinically depressed for a year. That was a very hard thing to come back from. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to come back from it. Not just politically—screw that—but emotionally, as a human being. I had such a sharp rise—relative obscurity in Oakland and suddenly I have a White House job, and six months later, out the back door. I’m not quite sure how I made it through all that. I had a lot of support—good family, good counseling. I lost my faith, and I lost my way, but I also remember feeling this little egg within myself, this egg of goodness and purpose. I remember feeling that I just had to wrap myself around that egg and fall until I hit the bottom, letting these demons that want to kick me just kick me, but try to protect that precious, loving quality in myself and hope for another opportunity. I tell you, at the time, I thought, “What great opportunities are there ever going to be beyond working at the Obama White House?” That’s a big cookie to have taken off your plate. You may never find another way to serve that impactfully.

It’s not just the fall. When you’re on the rise, you’re the focal point of your own effort. When you’re on the fall, you’re the focal point of your enemy’s efforts. But then, once you’re down and done, everything moves on and then you’re the focus of nothing. And that’s as painful as anything else. You’re not even worth kicking. That dog is dead.

In those times, I looked at my heroes, and that brought some comfort. Look at Bobby Kennedy, who was also in the White House and who had to leave in a much worse way because he lost his brother. And you see him trying to find his way back to purpose, back to “How can I be of some use?” And you see him on that Senate campaign in ’66, sometimes wearing his brother’s jacket, looking pretty small in it. I thought about how difficult that must have been. The country is in complete turmoil, in desperate need of leadership. He’s got huge responsibilities for his whole family, which is also grieving and in shock. His country needs him, his family needs him, but you see him still broken, trying to do his job. That was an incredibly useful example for me.

KK: What did you learn from it?

VJ: I learned a lot of bad things, sobering things, about people. When you’re in the White House, your phone rings all the time. It literally just sits there and vibrates. When you leave the White House, you can go two days and nobody calls you for anything. And you suddenly realize, “Oh, I thought people liked me because I’m like such a clever guy.” But it’s actually your position. It’s how high your stock is in the public eye. So that was sobering, but it brought me closer to my faith. It brought me closer to God. There are some things that you can only learn in pain—that you can only learn when all the distractions and titillations of public success are not available. So I learned how to pray. I learned how to fight on through the valleys when it’s difficult.

I learned how important it is to be there for people when they’re down. You know, Prince, the rock star, reached out. He gave me a lot of encouragement. So when I see somebody get tripped up in the media cycle, I try to reach out because it matters a lot to them in that moment. There are Native Americans out there getting sprayed with water hoses because they don’t want their kids drinking poison water, and nobody comes to help. Or they come to help for ten minutes, and then the camera moves on and nobody comes back. Or the coal miners… Or the Muslim mom whose kids are going out the front door with their hijabs on, she doesn’t know if they’re going to get hurt. I understand how lonely the struggle can be. I think that if you bear your own cross the right way, you can come out the other side with a little bit more wisdom. Your dad loved that poem about wisdom: “Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” That’s true: It’s awful. But I’ve learned: Your successes give you your confidence, but your setbacks give you your character.

I rely for my inspiration on so much that your father said, but the truth is that for me it’s really about who he was being when he was saying that stuff. You were talking about how he was kind of groping for the truth, that he was exposed doing that in interviews. To me, that’s a sign of high integrity. Because even if you had the answer yesterday, it doesn’t mean it’s the right answer today. It doesn’t mean you haven’t learned something or seen something that might make you reconsider. I think that’s a beautiful quality.

When I say your dad is my North Star, I’m very serious about it. I don’t prepare when I go on television—at all. If it goes well, it goes well. If it goes badly, it is a horrific experience, I’ll tell you that. I’ve had both. But all too often, I sit there and my colleagues have already written out their “talking points.” They have a checklist of talking points they’re going to bang through, and they don’t give a damn if Mars just fell from the sky. They’re going to say what they came on the air to say. And they have an audience of whatever their little tribe is, and as long as those people give them a pat on the head for having said this one great thing, they’re fine. I don’t do that. I sit there and I try to listen to what people are actually saying. If I can give anybody credit for having said something interesting or surprising, I’m going to give it to them—Left or Right, it doesn’t matter—and then see what truth I can find from that moment. I learned more from watching your dad do that than from any of the great lines on statues and in books. So I don’t have a favorite Bobby Kennedy thing to say, I have a favorite Bobby Kennedy way to be. And I’m chasing that.